Way too many people believe in the Free Lunch concept. The harsh truth is free meals don't last more than a couple of days, if they're offered at all. My ISP is the local telco (a rural telephone cooperative) and is the only one in the area offering DSL service. 2.2 Mbit ADSL was first offered by them for $60/month. The price soon raised to $90/month. About two months ago they explained that to feed their DSL customers alone was costing them 2x what they were bringing in from monthly charges. Rather than further increase the monthly cost, the ISP has chosen to no longer have any guarantees of thruput as their current customer base is already saturating one OC3 and one T3 circuit. Their monthly cost for those circuits to Sprintlink and Cable & Wireless, as well as their equipment upkeep and tech support has been to too high, even with hundreds of customers.
The simple fact is, the per-customer cost to them is higher than what they can reasonably charge without sacrificing service. They're not venture capital funded, they're a local telephone cooperative and cannot afford to bleed that much money.
To answer a FAQ, yes, they do offer lower-thruput DSL services at much lower costs. 384/128 Kbit ADSL is offered for $15/month + equipment rental or purchase.
Sure, Silicon Graphics is most likely not going to build a $995 IRIX/MIPS worktation with those specs (PC133 RAM, EIDE drives, ghetto 3D), but a $2000 - $3000 O2, $8000 Octane, or better yet, a line of 1U - 4U IRIX/MIPS rackmount servers would sure be nice. SGI has the world going for them, their customers would like to buy more of their systems, but pricing and exact models offered have been a pretty serious turn-off in recent months.
Not to mention that ghastly new "sgi" logo. Guess it fits their IA-32 and IA-64 systems, though.
"I was wondering if you were building in an "expression engine" that could be used on any model, or if those expressions had to be manually animated for each model."
Probably quite true. And even with Mac OS X I doubt Apple will gain any server ground. Not without "real" servers with hotswapable components and ECC RAM. A "real" server enclosure would be nice too.
I know of quite a few folks that use Linux as their desktop workstations in very non-Linux environments, such as high performance computing centers filled with SGI Origins, IBM SPs, and huge Alpha beasts. Aside from the Darwin Suns (Ultras 5 and 10) and maybe the Ultra 60, there really are no affordable "real unix" workstations. A linux box with a couple of gfx cards an a pair of monitors works great for that desktop of 8 xterms, netscape, and xemacs. An SGI Octane or Sun Ultra would really be overkill when the real work is going on in the big iron anyway.
John Carmack. The guy is not only an OpenGL god, but has also almost single handedly written multiple amazing 3D engines. For multiple platforms. While having time to help opensource GL drivers at the same time. And keeping us updated. And making public speeches. The guy can't even be human!
But then I can't help but wonder, how many other "John Carmacks" are out there. Developers that really know their stuff and aren't tied to one platform. The ones we never really hear about, the ones that are quiet and contributing around the clock. I can rattle off the names of 6 folks at id, but can't even think of a single person that worked on Unreal/UT.
Sounds about right, at least for that exact job. Though Steve Jobs was an actual engineer at Atari for over a year and actually did do some decent work when he actually felt like working. Later, in the early Apple days he often said "I don't do digital" and "I don't to analog" (whichever fit the specific situation) to avoid engineering work. Not that it mattered much, Woz was truly the brains of the operation, with some cool help later on by an assortment of engineering icons (John "Captain Crunch" Draper, Randy Wigginston, and others). My favorite Randy quote was "Jobs brought back this brand new disk drive. I was soon writting a Disk Operating System even though I didn't even know what in the hell that was".
Is it just me, or is all of this competition leading to higher prices? Heh. Yeah, yeah, I realize we're getting SGI Infinite Reality-like performance for $600, but still. Though it's hard to beat $80 Radeons for bang-for-the-buck. I'm still plodding away with my TNT2, though.
$350 as an Apple Store option (which is not really $350, because the GeForce 3 would replace the default GeForce2, thus can be thought of as $350 more than the GeForce 2).
True, though the GeForce2 and Radeon are the base cards for all but the very cheapest G4 model. For example, a base G4/533 comes with the buyers choice of a GeForce2 MX or ATI Radeon. Upgrading to a GeForce3 is an additional $350. There is no option to "downgrade" from that base model.
Many publishers like to have different boxes / different SKU's for each version. This allows them to collect specific data as far as how many mac users, windows users, linux users they've sold to. That data is then used for future products to determine, for example, if it's worth while to codevelop a mac version. In most cases, yes, it's silly. Especially for easily portable games such as Quake3. It makes more sense for a product that is harder to port, say, something that relies heavily upon DirectX.
I don't recall Jobs ever even claiming to code... aside from maybe an Apple or Pixar reference -- "we've been working hard".
AFAIK, the last time Jobs did any actual coding/designing was when he worked for Atari in the pre-Apple era. I belive his last project was "breakout" (the block game) with Woz... which leads to another story of how he kept more than his share of the paycheck...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Linux Q3A outsell the Mac OS version by a fair margin? I don't really see why there was any concern for the future of id games for Linux.
Also, as far as I know, Carmack actually built the inital Linux port. Loki published and maintains it. (And has been helping others port as well... such as Richard Hess's SGI IRIX port).
...how an increase in GNU/Linux choices often leads to increased arguing over which should be The Best and The Standard? And eventually, a whole boatload of choices usually results in one being pushed down everyone's throats? Distros outta ship with earplugs.
Nuhno! Wasn't trying to be some old condescending asshole! I was just commenting on how the ENTIRE 'net world used the term 'bandwidth'. Hell even I use it in that sense at times. Kinda wonder where it got started...
*sigh* I wish I knew. I guess some folks want to feel secure in that they're using the "best" and that everyone else feels the same way. Hell, I use IRIX most of the time, it's "better" for me.
RPM is truly enterprise scalable and is much more of a "standard" than Debian apt-get. Shucks, 91% of the Linux world uses Red Hat, and subsequently, RPM. I suppose one could advocate Debian, but that time would be better spent further improving Red Hat, IMHO. Any thoughts?
Reading that made me wonder... where can one buy some film badges (the sort that radiology techs wear to alert them of excessive exposure) ? Anyone happen to know?
There are MANY games, both old and new, that work fine on a carrier 28800 dialup. Just because a modem may not hold its own for the newest crop of first person shooters doesn't close the doors to all games. I personally don't even play FPS games for more than probably 35% of my total gaming experience. The "get him in your sights and pull the trigger" fun only lasts so long.
Probably the same reason my "gaming machine" is a "lowly" PII/450 with a TNT2. I'm in it for the fun, not the pretty graphics or the high-speed action of FPS. Unless you're maybe talking about racing games, which have worked great for me over dialup for one-on-one and group grudge matches.
Mac OS X, no less. With GeForce 3 and drivers already sorta working, it looks like we won't have to worry much about OpenGL acceleration under Apple's new OS.
At least Apple is trying. You don't see Microsoft opening up anything. Or perhaps I haven't dug far enough into www.microsoft.com (I get too many Netscape javascript errors).
... "innovators" that are clearly stealing away VA's market with misinformation. VA is the first real innovator and brought about many great products and benefits to linux back in the days of "VA Research". Today VA provides fully scalable systems that literally smoke the best Sun and SGI systems. To be anyone else and say you're as good or better than VA is total BS.
I'm sad to see VA go, but it's not their fault, its the fault of money-hungry closed source companies that are scared of competition.
Unlike cloning, Apple would be able to control development, pricing, and other factors. They could make a profit any way they see fit. Folks that have no need for a G4 tower enclosure could buy the ATX board from Apple and any sorta enclosure they need... be it a 1U rackmount or full tower deskside case with 12 drive bays.
Slashdot Mirror
Very, very well put!
Way too many people believe in the Free Lunch concept. The harsh truth is free meals don't last more than a couple of days, if they're offered at all. My ISP is the local telco (a rural telephone cooperative) and is the only one in the area offering DSL service. 2.2 Mbit ADSL was first offered by them for $60/month. The price soon raised to $90/month. About two months ago they explained that to feed their DSL customers alone was costing them 2x what they were bringing in from monthly charges. Rather than further increase the monthly cost, the ISP has chosen to no longer have any guarantees of thruput as their current customer base is already saturating one OC3 and one T3 circuit. Their monthly cost for those circuits to Sprintlink and Cable & Wireless, as well as their equipment upkeep and tech support has been to too high, even with hundreds of customers.
The simple fact is, the per-customer cost to them is higher than what they can reasonably charge without sacrificing service. They're not venture capital funded, they're a local telephone cooperative and cannot afford to bleed that much money.
To answer a FAQ, yes, they do offer lower-thruput DSL services at much lower costs. 384/128 Kbit ADSL is offered for $15/month + equipment rental or purchase.
Sure, Silicon Graphics is most likely not going to build a $995 IRIX/MIPS worktation with those specs (PC133 RAM, EIDE drives, ghetto 3D), but a $2000 - $3000 O2, $8000 Octane, or better yet, a line of 1U - 4U IRIX/MIPS rackmount servers would sure be nice. SGI has the world going for them, their customers would like to buy more of their systems, but pricing and exact models offered have been a pretty serious turn-off in recent months.
Not to mention that ghastly new "sgi" logo. Guess it fits their IA-32 and IA-64 systems, though.
...So what's the question?
"I was wondering if you were building in an "expression engine" that could be used on any model, or if those expressions had to be manually animated for each model."
That looks like the question to me.
Probably quite true. And even with Mac OS X I doubt Apple will gain any server ground. Not without "real" servers with hotswapable components and ECC RAM. A "real" server enclosure would be nice too.
I know of quite a few folks that use Linux as their desktop workstations in very non-Linux environments, such as high performance computing centers filled with SGI Origins, IBM SPs, and huge Alpha beasts. Aside from the Darwin Suns (Ultras 5 and 10) and maybe the Ultra 60, there really are no affordable "real unix" workstations. A linux box with a couple of gfx cards an a pair of monitors works great for that desktop of 8 xterms, netscape, and xemacs. An SGI Octane or Sun Ultra would really be overkill when the real work is going on in the big iron anyway.
John Carmack. The guy is not only an OpenGL god, but has also almost single handedly written multiple amazing 3D engines. For multiple platforms. While having time to help opensource GL drivers at the same time. And keeping us updated. And making public speeches. The guy can't even be human!
But then I can't help but wonder, how many other "John Carmacks" are out there. Developers that really know their stuff and aren't tied to one platform. The ones we never really hear about, the ones that are quiet and contributing around the clock. I can rattle off the names of 6 folks at id, but can't even think of a single person that worked on Unreal/UT.
Sounds about right, at least for that exact job. Though Steve Jobs was an actual engineer at Atari for over a year and actually did do some decent work when he actually felt like working. Later, in the early Apple days he often said "I don't do digital" and "I don't to analog" (whichever fit the specific situation) to avoid engineering work. Not that it mattered much, Woz was truly the brains of the operation, with some cool help later on by an assortment of engineering icons (John "Captain Crunch" Draper, Randy Wigginston, and others). My favorite Randy quote was "Jobs brought back this brand new disk drive. I was soon writting a Disk Operating System even though I didn't even know what in the hell that was".
Is it just me, or is all of this competition leading to higher prices? Heh. Yeah, yeah, I realize we're getting SGI Infinite Reality-like performance for $600, but still. Though it's hard to beat $80 Radeons for bang-for-the-buck. I'm still plodding away with my TNT2, though.
$350 as an Apple Store option (which is not really $350, because the GeForce 3 would replace the default GeForce2, thus can be thought of as $350 more than the GeForce 2).
True, though the GeForce2 and Radeon are the base cards for all but the very cheapest G4 model. For example, a base G4/533 comes with the buyers choice of a GeForce2 MX or ATI Radeon. Upgrading to a GeForce3 is an additional $350. There is no option to "downgrade" from that base model.
Many publishers like to have different boxes / different SKU's for each version. This allows them to collect specific data as far as how many mac users, windows users, linux users they've sold to. That data is then used for future products to determine, for example, if it's worth while to codevelop a mac version. In most cases, yes, it's silly. Especially for easily portable games such as Quake3. It makes more sense for a product that is harder to port, say, something that relies heavily upon DirectX.
I don't recall Jobs ever even claiming to code... aside from maybe an Apple or Pixar reference -- "we've been working hard".
AFAIK, the last time Jobs did any actual coding/designing was when he worked for Atari in the pre-Apple era. I belive his last project was "breakout" (the block game) with Woz... which leads to another story of how he kept more than his share of the paycheck...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Linux Q3A outsell the Mac OS version by a fair margin? I don't really see why there was any concern for the future of id games for Linux.
Also, as far as I know, Carmack actually built the inital Linux port. Loki published and maintains it. (And has been helping others port as well... such as Richard Hess's SGI IRIX port).
>> Unless you were trying to score buzzword
>>points, this post makes no sense...
Nah, nothing that deep. Just repeating propaganda.
What's your opensource strategy?
...how an increase in GNU/Linux choices often leads to increased arguing over which should be The Best and The Standard? And eventually, a whole boatload of choices usually results in one being pushed down everyone's throats? Distros outta ship with earplugs.
Ah, hell... just use an Amiga or an SGI.
Nuhno! Wasn't trying to be some old condescending asshole! I was just commenting on how the ENTIRE 'net world used the term 'bandwidth'. Hell even I use it in that sense at times. Kinda wonder where it got started...
Anyone happen to know how long SGI's software distributions using inst and swmgr have been around? Just asking for historical reasons.
Am I the only one that dislikes the common usage of the term "bandwidth"??
*sigh*
Kiddie: "I've got LOTS of bandwith"
Clued: "Oh, really? What, rom 20 KHz to 200 MHz?"
*sigh* I wish I knew. I guess some folks want to feel secure in that they're using the "best" and that everyone else feels the same way. Hell, I use IRIX most of the time, it's "better" for me.
RPM is truly enterprise scalable and is much more of a "standard" than Debian apt-get. Shucks, 91% of the Linux world uses Red Hat, and subsequently, RPM. I suppose one could advocate Debian, but that time would be better spent further improving Red Hat, IMHO. Any thoughts?
Reading that made me wonder... where can one buy some film badges (the sort that radiology techs wear to alert them of excessive exposure) ? Anyone happen to know?
There are MANY games, both old and new, that work fine on a carrier 28800 dialup. Just because a modem may not hold its own for the newest crop of first person shooters doesn't close the doors to all games. I personally don't even play FPS games for more than probably 35% of my total gaming experience. The "get him in your sights and pull the trigger" fun only lasts so long.
Probably the same reason my "gaming machine" is a "lowly" PII/450 with a TNT2. I'm in it for the fun, not the pretty graphics or the high-speed action of FPS. Unless you're maybe talking about racing games, which have worked great for me over dialup for one-on-one and group grudge matches.
Mac OS X, no less. With GeForce 3 and drivers already sorta working, it looks like we won't have to worry much about OpenGL acceleration under Apple's new OS.
At least Apple is trying. You don't see Microsoft opening up anything. Or perhaps I haven't dug far enough into www.microsoft.com (I get too many Netscape javascript errors).
... "innovators" that are clearly stealing away VA's market with misinformation. VA is the first real innovator and brought about many great products and benefits to linux back in the days of "VA Research". Today VA provides fully scalable systems that literally smoke the best Sun and SGI systems. To be anyone else and say you're as good or better than VA is total BS.
I'm sad to see VA go, but it's not their fault, its the fault of money-hungry closed source companies that are scared of competition.
Unlike cloning, Apple would be able to control development, pricing, and other factors. They could make a profit any way they see fit. Folks that have no need for a G4 tower enclosure could buy the ATX board from Apple and any sorta enclosure they need... be it a 1U rackmount or full tower deskside case with 12 drive bays.
Apple will port their OS to x86 on the same day that SGI includes the IDO (compilers) with their OS.